Kemi Badenoch’s Credibility Swap

The Conservative leader's decision to spread a racist far-right conspiracy theory about the Netflix series Adolescence tells us a huge amount about her leadership

Kemi Badenoch this week helped to spread a racist far-right conspiracy theory that the lead character in the Netflix drama Adolescence had been “race-swapped” from black to white.

The Conservative leader told GB News that the show, about a fictional teenage murderer, had in fact been “based on a real story” and that “my understanding is that the [real life] boy who committed that crime was not white.”

Now it’s worth saying immediately that this simply isn’t true.

The claim, which originated on the bowels of far-right Twitter, before being boosted by Elon Musk himself, had already been repeatedly debunked by the creators of the show itself.

However, despite this, Badenoch went on to repeat it word for word, before using it as the premise for an attack on Keir Starmer, for having praised the programme.

“The Prime Minister should not be building policy on fiction. He should be building policy on reality,” she told the channel.

However, far from basing her comments on “reality”, as she suggested, she had instead simply regurgitated them unquestioningly from Twitter, without having even watched the programme herself.

Yet when I asked Badenoch’s spokesman about this today, his response was extraordinary.